The Glasp Story

From 0 to 3 Million

The Glasp Growth Story

In September 2020, Glasp was an idea and a few lines of code. No funding, no users, no playbook. This is the story of how we grew it to 3 million users: hundreds of onboarding calls, content that compounds, viral AI tools, a community flywheel, and the shift from search engines to answer engines. Free to read, chapter by chapter.

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Table of Contents

  1. 01Why We Built GlaspGlasp started in September 2020 with no funding, no users, and a mission: build a digital legacy of human learning where knowledge outlives the person who found it.
  2. 02Finding Your First 1,000 UsersOver 750 one-on-one onboarding calls, two audience pivots, and zero ad spend: how Glasp found its first thousand users and learned what they actually needed.
  3. 03Distribution That CompoundsSEO, .edu and .gov backlinks, Medium, guest posts, and repeat Product Hunt launches: the zero-CAC channels that kept paying off long after the work was done.
  4. 04Riding the AI WaveDALLE-dle, a ChatGPT extension shipped in days, a YouTube Summary with ChatGPT that outgrew the product itself, and Digital Clones: how Glasp turned the AI wave into growth without losing the mission.
  5. 05Building With the CommunityGlasp Talk interviews, a newsletter that grew past half a million subscribers, and a community flywheel that turned users into co-builders.
  6. 06The AEO Era: From Search Engines to Answer EnginesWhen AI assistants started answering questions directly, search traffic stopped being the whole game. How Glasp adapted with Deep Dive content, llms.txt, structured data, and an MCP connector, and grew ChatGPT referrals 37x in four months.
  7. 07Research as a Growth ChannelWhy a two-person startup published peer-grade research on arXiv: what millions of highlights reveal about how people read, and what open research does for trust in the AI era.
  8. 08Principles for Sustainable GrowthAND thinking, persistence as a strategy, resource efficiency, community-driven development, mission alignment, and the compound effect: the framework behind every Glasp growth decision.
  9. 09The Journey ContinuesThe lessons that survived five years of building Glasp, what comes next, and the full timeline from the first line of code to the answer-engine era.